Nicholsfield
The 1938 Ordnance Survey map shows open ground inside the triangle formed by Station Road, Guildford Road and Spy Lane. Houses and cottages followed the older roads, with Loxwood pond and Pond Cottage close to the later entrance to Nicholsfield. Petworth Rural District Council selected part of this ground for Loxwood’s first council estate in 1953.
At the foundation ceremony for North Hall in April 1937, Major Farmer told the gathering that Loxwood had been promised a water supply and electricity; the new hall had already been wired in readiness. Local archive records date the arrival of water and electricity to 1938, with mains drainage following during the 1940s.
Construction began in the Coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II. Petworth Rural District Council was also building council houses at Wisborough Green, Northchapel and Plaistow. A council report in July 1953 referred to forty-eight houses at Wisborough Green, sixteen at Northchapel and twenty at Plaistow, alongside the first twenty at Loxwood. The same report recorded the Government’s national programme of about 300,000 houses a year.
The name Nicholsfield
At its July 1953 meeting Petworth Rural District Council recorded that the Loxwood housing site was to be called Nicholsfield. Local research associates the name with Nicholas Nicoll, whose surname also appears in records as Nycol, Nychol and Nicholls.
Nicholas Nicoll was one of eight local landholders who joined Walter Dysworth, Vicar of Wisborough Green, in the 1404 petition to Robert Rede, Bishop of Chichester, for permission to build a place of worship at Loxwood. The present Church of St John the Baptist contains a medieval oak bench believed to have come from the former chapel. A diocesan faculty issued in 1901 authorised the transfer of seats from the old chapel to the new church. A brass name slip on the back of one surviving bench reads ‘Nicholls’.
The first twenty houses
The first contract covered twenty houses towards the rear of the site, with the ground nearer Station Road reserved for later building. Petworth Rural District Council owned the houses, maintained them as council property and rented them to households selected from its housing list.
Photographs taken around 1960 show the finished houses in short terraces and paired groups. They are two storeys high, with brick walls, pitched tiled roofs, tall chimneys and simple porches. Low hedges divide the front gardens, concrete paths run beside the road and broad grass verges separate the houses from the carriageway. The estate roads in the photographs contain very few cars.
Bricks, plasterers and footpaths
On 16 July 1953 the council’s Building Surveyor and Licensing Officer, G. A. Parker, reported 6,000 facing bricks and 2,000 common bricks at the Loxwood site. Further deliveries had been promised, probably in small lots. Parker expected the twenty houses to be ready for occupation within three or four months if supplies continued.
By 22 October all twenty houses had roofs and the outside work was practically finished apart from the footpaths. Work inside the houses had slowed because plasterers were difficult to obtain. Parker told the council that the other trades were well advanced and that the houses could be completed rapidly if more plasterers remained on the site. The council was still reporting slow progress at Loxwood and Northchapel on 19 November 1953.
Choosing the first tenants
Petworth Rural District Council allocated its houses through a points system. In September 1953 it revised the scheme used to rank housing applicants, taking account of local residence and household circumstances such as overcrowding, family size and the number of bedrooms required. Vacant council houses in Loxwood were offered first to qualifying village applicants.
Five households already living in three-bedroom council houses in Loxwood were asked to consider moving to new two-bedroom homes at Nicholsfield. Their three-bedroom houses could then be offered to families who needed the extra room. The Housing Committee also ordered a review of other council houses described as under-occupied. During the discussion one councillor asked for applicants to have some choice among the new homes because ‘friends might like to have houses together’.
Twenty more houses
The council considered a second group of houses in 1954. An allocation intended for Plaistow was transferred to Loxwood while the council continued seeking a suitable site at Plaistow. Nine letters of protest reached Petworth Rural District Council, including representations from local branches of the British Legion and the Women’s Institute. At its August meeting the council discussed the letters in committee, approved further work at Nicholsfield and instructed G. A. Parker to obtain tenders for about twenty houses and prepare a garage scheme.
The tender notice appeared in the West Sussex Gazette on 19 August 1954. Builders were invited to price twenty units ‘of various types’ on the existing Nicholsfield estate. Specifications and bills of quantities were available from the council’s architects, Godman and Kay of North Parade, Horsham. Tenders had to be delivered in a plain sealed envelope marked ‘TENDER – LOXWOOD HOUSES’ by noon on Monday 13 September 1954.
The second group was built beside and east of the first twenty houses. The 1961 Ordnance Survey map shows both housing groups and the estate road.
Garages and hot water
In August 1954 the West Sussex County Times announced ‘Good News for Motorists’ after planning consent was granted for eight lock-up garages and a turning space at Nicholsfield. Petworth Rural District Council then included the site in a programme for forty-four garages on four council estates: twenty-four at Greatpin Croft in Fittleworth, ten at Neil Ball in Plaistow, eight at Nicholsfield and two at Greenfield in Sutton. The eight Nicholsfield garages were estimated to cost £1,270.
Water and electricity had reached Loxwood before Nicholsfield was built. Hot water was still treated as a separate improvement. In 1955 Petworth Rural District Council was considering twenty-six applications from tenants for its new ‘Hot Water Service’. The applications came only two years after the first Nicholsfield houses were built.
Families at Nicholsfield
A resident’s recollection gives names to some of the first twenty houses. The writer had lived at No. 1 Nicholsfield with his parents, Don and Margaret Mitchell, and his younger brother Chris. He remembered the Cheeseman family at No. 2, the Phillips family at No. 4, Ron and Ivy Taylor with their daughter Jennifer at No. 7, the Foster family at No. 10, the Hooks at No. 14, the White family at No. 16, the Garton family at No. 18, Ken and Joan Martin with their sons Terry and Bob at No. 19, and the Cavendish family at No. 20. Joan Martin was remembered as Margaret Mitchell’s best friend.
Kenneth Foster at No. 10 was remembered as the writer’s best friend. Jennifer Taylor at No. 7 was remembered as his ‘first love’.
The Nicholsfield bonfire
A large oak stood beside the open grass at the centre of Nicholsfield and appears prominently in a photograph from about 1960. The houses stand behind it with young hedges, broad verges and open ground in the foreground.
The former resident of No. 1 remembered that open ground being used every year for the village bonfire and fireworks. The bonfire was built near the oak for the November 5 celebrations, with the surrounding council houses only a short distance away. He remembered the event as the ‘Nicholsfield bonfire and firework night’.
The school at Nicholsfield
The 1961 Ordnance Survey map shows the two groups of council houses with open ground nearer Station Road. Loxwood County Primary School opened on that part of the site in 1964 and replaced the Victorian schoolhouse on Vicarage Hill. Henry Pepper moved with the school after serving as headmaster of the older building from January 1960. He had previously been Deputy Headmaster at Northgate School in Crawley, was a keen sportsman and football referee, and had lost an eye during the Second World War.
West Sussex Record Office holds the programme for the official opening of Loxwood County Primary School in 1967. The catalogue records it as item E/129/8/1, a four-page programme dated 1967.
